Words Without Borders partnered with SLICE to produce an International Exquisite Corpse story, written by four writer/translator teams from around the world. Below is the resulting story (in both the English translation and the original languages), which was published in issue 22 of Slice Magazine.

The first thing you should know is that an Exquisite Corpse is a game. Here’s how we play: One writer pens the first segment of a story. The final line of that first segment is handed to the second writer, who continues the story. And so on, and so on. The end result is a story stitched together by a group of writers, each one not really knowing what came beforehand. Once again, SLICE has partnered with Words Without Borders to produce a multilingual Exquisite Corpse. We asked four writers and translators to play. The story unfolds in Arabic, French, Swedish, and Catalan. The writers were given only two instructions: stick to one page and use this issue’s theme, Borders, as inspiration. The Exquisite Corpse is a story that reinvents itself over and over. Each new voice at once builds and dismantles, resulting in fiction that, like any lively conversation, is full of synergy and conflict.
—Celia Blue Johnson, Creative Director of SLICE

Words Without Borders is thrilled to again partner with SLICE to present a multilingual Exquisite Corpse. For an organization committed to breaking down borders through the translation, publication, and promotion of contemporary literature from around the world, it is thrilling to witness the creation of this Borders-themed narrative by four writer/translator teams whose collaboration transcends languages and nations. You can find more work by these talented writers and translators in WWB’s free monthly online magazine and on our blog, WWB Daily. We hope that you’ll enjoy this dynamic and richly layered story and that you’ll keep reading and supporting remarkable literature from around the globe.
—Jessie Chaffee, Editor of WWB Daily, Words Without Borders

Borders: An International Exquisite Corpse (English Translation)

Part 1
By Basma Abdel Aziz
Translated from Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette

Nadia opened her eyes and looked out the window. The streetlights were still on, even though it was past sunrise. She smiled with a heady delight. She would be going to work shortly, where today the staff was planning a celebration in her honor. She was going to pretend to be surprised, just as they were going to pretend to have surprised her. She’d made the arrangements, plans, and preparations, and she’d asked them to pool money to buy the food and drinks that would be laid out on long desks for the party. They’d all done as she’d asked. No one had dared to object, despite their collective distress at throwing money away.

She was the one who had decided that she was the boss: there was no question that she was the prettiest, cleverest, and most important, and that she was capable of leading the institute the way she wanted. In preparation for the party, she had asked Shaheen, her loyal servant and right-hand man, to produce a gift befitting her position. She planned to be astonished, let out a soft gasp, and squeeze out a couple of tears when she accepted the precious round crystal plaque engraved with her picture. This was also going to be a surprise, even though she herself had selected and sent them the photo.

Her reverie was interrupted by the superintendent shouting downstairs. “Son of a bitch . . . where are we supposed to buy bread? A pound only gets you three lousy pieces now!” She immediately thought of his sturdily built wife. As if she needed any bread! The woman’s massive, thick body; the arms she bared while wiping down the tenants’ cars early in the morning, plump and white. She didn’t need sustenance; there was enough stored in her ample flesh to last for months.

Nadia got out of bed, wishing herself an absolutely splendid day filled with words of praise. As she washed her face and inspected the fine wrinkles that spread like deltas from the corners of her eyes, she remembered something she needed to tell Shaheen. Attendance was mandatory for the entire staff, and that meant everyone. It was unacceptable for a single person to be absent from the party; she would not tolerate reluctance or negligence from anyone. They all needed to show how much they loved and admired her; it would be useful for her.

A baby shrieked and then began wailing, and Nadia sighed with pure disgust. Ever since the super’s wife had given birth, the sound of the baby’s crying had been ruining her life. The boy had turned out disabled; there was something wrong with his head that made it impossible for him to interact with people around him like other children. The only things that came out of his mouth were incomprehensible and terrifying noises. Without a doubt, he was going to grow up and become an idiot employee like the ones she supervised. She closed the door behind her and set off for the institute.

Part 2
By Fouad Laroui
Translated from French by Emma Ramadan

She closed the door behind her and set off for the Institute.

She decided to walk instead of taking a taxi or bus. After everything that had happened, she needed to think. Walking would help her get her thoughts straight.

After all, it’s not every day that . . .

The trumpeting of an elephant interrupted her thinking. An elephant? In the middle of the city? No, it was a 4x4 (what a monstrosity those things are . . .) that was disturbing the peace. There was a cattle catcher on the grill. The huge number of cattle wandering the streets certainly justified such a thing.

The driver cried out through the lowered window: “Pretty girl!” He was talking to her.

She walked faster, without responding.

If he only knew, the creep . . .

If he only knew what she had left behind her, back there . . .

Again, she was assailed by confused thoughts. She took a deep breath. Should she stop, turn around, go back there and . . .

“Hey you!”

The yell, furious, was aimed at her. She froze.

It was a cop.

Here we go.

She stopped moving, convulsively squeezing her bag, her heart racing.

The man approached slowly. He greeted her by bringing two fingers to his cap, then asked dryly:

“Is that a habit of yours?”

Her throat dry, her heart still racing wildly, her eyes slightly bugged out, she remained silent.

The man seemed to be chewing something; he continued to stare at her. Then:

“Are you mute?”

She swallowed painfully then managed to murmur:

“Excuse me?”

“Do you make a habit of crossing on a red light?”

So that was it.

She closed her eyes. The light . . . She thought again of . . . No! She couldn’t think about it. She glanced discreetly at her watch. In a half hour, she had to be at the Institute.

Part 3
By Karolina Ramqvist
Translated from Swedish by Saskia Vogel

In a half hour, she had to be at the Institute. She could already hear how it would sound when she came in, a few minutes late. The excuses that would come out of her mouth, and how they’d immerse themselves in the cold small talk that always preceded this kind of meeting, and which, in her eyes, made them seem all the more absurd; people so willingly allowed the decisions being made there to be framed by accounts of how they were thinking about cleaning their desks, their morning sessions at the gym, plans they’d made for the weekend.

There’d be a touch of compulsion to her tardiness, as though being late was the only way she could protest what was happening there, and well, that’s how it was now.

She’d never wanted anything to do with this part of the organization. Ever more often, it was occurring to her that she could refuse, she could learn to say “no” even in this context, learn to “own her No,” as they said in the groups she took part in. But it wouldn’t change a thing.

Her therapist had offered her a suggestion for when the feeling of being invaded overwhelmed her. It was about imagining yourself sitting in flowing water surrounded by a fence with a locked gate and imagining being there without letting anyone else in. Or maybe you did let someone in—the important thing was that you were the one calling the shots. It was actually quite effective. All the way there, that’s how she pictured herself, and once she was standing at the door of the Institute, she could feel the strength of her resistance.

Part 4
By Maria Cabrera
Translated from the Catalan by Mary Ann Newman

All the way there, that’s how she pictured herself, and once she was standing at the door of the institute, she could feel the strength of her resistance.

She had stopped for a moment to take a deep breath, and the contact of the cold air with the pain in her mouth had spread like a whiplash inside her cheek. Driven by this impetus, she had opened the door with resolve and plunged into the institute of odontology.

It had all started midmorning, when she was trying to gnaw on some soft, sad morsel, and she had heard a crack and knew right away: it was him, the Molar, sending her a message that said, yes, dear, I am giving up, I am definitively breaking in two after thirty years of buccal battles and episodes of all colors and textures. Everything had moved quickly from then on: the fainting spell, the whirlpool sprint through Barcelona galloping on the shiny haunches of a taxi, and suddenly there she was, at the door of the dental clinic, and there she was, inside, being led grudgingly down the hall by a receptionist moving so slowly that, instead of walking, it seemed as if he were rowing through very dense waters, until they reached an elevator where he dropped her off, my name is Charon, he had said, and she got on and pressed number six, one floor down, then another, and yet another infernal circle, and the doors had opened and she had settled into the chair, and the dentist had come in with a perfunctory greeting and now he was looking at the Molar from close up, very close up, while a more legal and less playful cocaine was carrying her lips and a small lump of her consciousness far away, then the next thing was for the doctor to focus a very thin very very thin ray of light on the Molar, burrowing into the hole, yanking the poor tooth out with one tug and from that blackish well extracting globs of blood, a rabbit with pure white ears, and a nun dozing off on the counter of a pastry shop saying sorry, so sorry, I’ll be right with you. When it was done the doctor had carefully leaned over to peer into the hole and, white with shock, had called his assistant over: look, down there, you can see the customs house at the La Jonquera border! And making a megaphone with his hands he had shouted, sir, sir, can you hear meeeee? And the guard had raised his head, hand to
his chest, white with shock, and with a tone of annoyance and a trace of a French accent he had said, come on, you don’t have to shout so loud, you know? What’s all this hullabaloo up there? Haven’t I made it clear you have to get in line like everyone else? And the dentist, caught by surprise, had mumbled, no, look here, we were just up here in the dental clinic . . . Oh, sure, mister, don’t look at me, or give me any nonsense, surely you understand that we can’t be making exceptions even for doctors, you must take a number and wait your turn, if you can’t reach the tickets from up there, I will hand one up to you, and you just get in line like everyone else, and we’ll have plenty to talk about, you and I and the chief inspector, regarding this illegal entry you’ve opened up, on the other side of the Catalan border.

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Basma Abdel Aziz is a psychiatrist, writer, and sculptor. A long-standing vocal critic of government oppression in Egypt, she is the author of several works of nonfiction. In 2016 she was named one of Foreign Policy’s Global Thinkers for her debut novel, The Queue, which was also named to the longlist for the 2017 Best Translated Book Award. She lives in Cairo.

Fouad Laroui is a economist and writer born in 1958 in Oujda, Morocco. Over the past twenty years, Laroui has been consistently building an oeuvre centered around universally contemporary themes: identity in a globalized world, dialogue/confrontation between cultures, and the individual vs. the group. With ten novels and five collections of short stories written in French, plus two collections of poems written in Dutch, a play, many essays and scientific papers (written in French or English), his ongoing ambitious literary output has been recognized with many awards, including the Prix Albert Camus, Prix Mediterranée, Prix Goncourt de la Nouvelle, Grande médaille de la Francophonie de l’Académie française, Prix du meilleur roman francophone, Premio Francesco Alziator (Italy), Samuel-Pallache-Prijs (The Netherlands), and the E. du Perron Prijs (The Netherlands).

Karolina Ramqvist is one of the most influential feminists and writers of her generation in Sweden. She has published several novels—most recently, The White City (Grove Press)—short stories, essays, and criticism; has contributed widely to a range of leading political and literary journals; and is the former editor in chief of Arena magazine. She lives in Stockholm with her husband and children.

Maria Cabrera is a Catalan poet born in Girona in 1983. She teaches Catalan Linguistics in the University of Barcelona and works as proofreader for many publishing houses. As a poet, she has published three books: Jonàs (Jonah), which in 2004 received the Amadeu Oller Prize for young unpublished authors; La matinada clara (Bright Morning, 2010); and in 2017, La ciutat cansada (Tired City), for which she has just won the Carles Riba prize, considered the most prestigious Catalan poetry award.

Elisabeth Jaquette is a translator from the Arabic. She holds an MA from Columbia University and a BA from Swarthmore College, and she was a CASA Fellow at the American University of Cairo. Her work has been published in The Book of Khartoum (Comma Press, 2016), Life from Elsewhere (Pushkin Press, 2015), The Book of Gaza (Comma Press, 2014), the Guardian, and Asymptote, among other places. She is also the Arabic reading group chair for the UK publisher And Other Stories, and she was a judge for the 2016 PEN Translation Prize. Her first novel translation is The Queue by Basma Abdel Aziz (Melville House, 2016), which received a 2014 English PEN Translates Award.

Emma Ramadan is a literary translator based in Providence, Rhode Island, where she is the owner of Riffraff, a bookstore and bar. She is the recipient of a PEN/Heim grant, an NEA Translation Fellowship, and a Fulbright in Morocco. Her translations include Anne Garréta’s Sphinx and Not One Day (Deep Vellum), Fouad Laroui’s The Curious Case of Dassoukine’s Trousers (Deep Vellum), Anne Parian’s Monospace (La Presse/Fence Books), and Frédéric Forte’s 33 Flat Sonnets (Mindmade Books), and Virginie Despentes’s Pretty Things (Feminist Press). Her forthcoming translations include Delphine Minoui’s I’m Writing You From Tehran (FSG) and Marcus Malte’s The Boy (Restless Books).

Saskia Vogel is an author and Swedish-to-English literary translator. Her debut novel, I Am a Pornographer, will be published in 2019 by Dialogue Books/Little, Brown UK, Mondial in Sweden, and Alpha Decay in Spain. Her translations include works by Karolina Ramqvist, Lina Wolff, and Lena Andersson. Her writing and translations have appeared in publications such as Granta, the Paris Review Daily, Guernica, SLICE, the White Review, and the Offing. She holds a MA in comparative literature from University College London and a master’s in professional writing from the University of Southern California.

Mary Ann Newman translates from Catalan and Spanish. She has published short stories and a novel by Quim Monzó, nonfiction by Xavier Rubert de Ventós, and poetry by Josep Carner. Her most recent translation is Private Life,a 1932 Catalan classic by Josep Maria de Sagarra (Archipelago Books). She was awarded the Creu de Sant Jordi in 1998. She is currently executive director of the Farragut Fund for Catalan Culture in the US, a co-chair of the PEN Translation Committee, a member of the board of the Catalan Institute of America, a member of the North American Catalan Society, and a visiting scholar at the NYU Center for European and Mediterranean Studies.

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Words without Borders opens doors to international exchange through translation, publication, and promotion of the best international literature. Every month we publish select prose and poetry on our site. In addition we develop print anthologies, work with educators to bring literature in translation into classrooms, host events with foreign authors, and maintain an extensive archive of global writing.